Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tektronix!orca!tekecs!doghouse!snoopy
From: snoopy@doghouse.gwd.tek.com (Snoopy)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: The GNU Manifesto
Message-ID: <9670@tekecs.TEK.COM>
Date: 27 Jan 88 18:37:43 GMT
References: <153@mozart.UUCP> <1351@sugar.UUCP> <9591@tekecs.TEK.COM> <1393@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@tekecs.TEK.COM
Reply-To: snoopy@doghouse.gwd.tek.com (Snoopy)
Organization: The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm
Lines: 45

In article <1393@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <9591@tekecs.TEK.COM>, snoopy@doghouse.gwd.tek.com (Snoopy) writes:
>> Incorrect.  My home machine will run GNUmacs, and I know plenty of other
>> people who own machines that will run it.

>I guess my home computer could run GNUmacs, but I'd need two diskettes to
>fit everything I need to bring it up.

>What's your machine, that you run GNUmacs on? A 3b2 or equivalent?

A Tek 6130.  NS32016 @10MHz, MMU (16MB virtual process limit), FPU,
3MB RAM, 40MB disk, color bit-mapped integrated display, screaming tape...

>A home computer should cost no more than a small fraction of the price of
>a small car. I'll amend my statement to read that GNU can not run on any
>machine that any significant numbers of individuals can hope to own.

Priced cars lately?  :-(  Prices for machines powerful enough to run GNU
are dropping.

>> The expensive part of a home Unix machine is the disk, not the CPU/MMU/RAM.
>> Disk space is still expensive, and the MTBF is, er, depressing.

>A 20 megabyte drive and controller for the IBM-PC costs on the order of a
>couple of hundred dollars. A megabyte of DRAMS costs a substantial fraction
>of that.

A 20 meg drive doesn't cut it.  (neither does my 40, but like I said,
disk space is expensive...)  If you want to do software development,
run news and mail, etc, you quickly need a few hundred megabytes.

>The IBM-PC is the cheapest machine you can run UNIX on... and even then the
>UNIX is way too bloated. Let me tell you a story... once upon a time there was
>a good little operating system named Version 7...

(a) The IBM-PC doesn't have memory management. (b) The hardware can be
*destroyed* by software.  Totally unacceptable.

And before v7 was v6.  I never used v7, but v6 was amasingly fast.
MINIX is supposed to be ~v7.  Put MINIX on a 386 machine, do a bit of
work on it and you might have something.

Snoopy
tektronix!doghouse.gwd!snoopy
snoopy@doghouse.gwd.tek.com